Narratives of the Witchcraft Cases 1648-1706

A VERY RARE EDITION AND THE ONLY ONE I CAN TRACE WITH THE GOLD-STAMPED BLACK COVERS AND SPINE
A SPECIAL PRIVATELY PRINTED EDITION
WITCHCRAFT, THE SALEM TRIALS, THE SUPERNATURAL, BEWITCHMENTS, WITCH PERSECUTIONS, APPARITIONS, SPECTRES, WONDERS OF THE INVISIBLE WORLD, WITCH MEETINGS, THE STRANGE BOOKS, SPIRITS, THE ACCUSED, POSSESSION, THE INFERNAL SPIRITS, ANGELS, THE WICKED ONES, SPIRITUALITY, EXTENSIVE PASSAGES ON THE TRIALS, AND SO MUCH MORE
ONE OF THE MOST IN-DEPTH MANUSCRIPTS EVER PENNED ON THE WITCH TRIALS
PLEASE NOTE: THIS IS AN ACCURATE HISTORICAL BOOK OF THE WITCH TRIALS AND DOES CONTAIN SUBJECT MATTER AND DESCRIPTIONS OF EVENTS THAT TRANSPIRED, WHICH ARE GRAPHIC IN NATURE

This is one of the most accurate and well-written books ever written on the persecution of the Witches. It's a scarce edition, especially with the black gold stamped covers; before listing it, I checked every known online bookstore and found zero listed. For anyone interested in one of the most significant accounts of the witchcraft trials ever written, this is considered by many to be one of the most monumental works ever produced.

These narratives of witchcraft are no fairy tales. Weird though they seem to us, they were the intensest of realities to thousands of men and women in seventeenth-century America. They were the bulletins of a war more actual, crueler, more momentous than any fray of flesh and blood. Nor were they bulletins alone, these messages of each latest skirmish in that age-long war of Heaven with Hell. To those enlisted in that war, they were instruction, encouragement, and appeal, as well, as in our day, to men once fascinated by world politics. To those awakened to these vaster interests of a universe, all pettier concerns seemed trivial and provincial. To count the matter a panic local to New England or even a passing madness of the Christian world is to take a narrow view of history.

The condition of this 31-year-old book is good. It does have some notable ages that I will point out. The covers have been well-kept but have some shelf wear and age, although they still display beautifully. The interior pages are naturally age-toned, and 17 have a faint damp mark to the lower margin area tips, which is far from the text and only aesthetic. There is some rubbing and wear to the gold endpapers, but they are still bright. It retains a firm binding with all pages present, clean of writing, and very well bound. I have a couple of these listed in my shop, and this one is $80 less due to the age associated with it. Overall, it is a very clean book that has been well preserved with some regular age and reading use but still very lovely.

But to the modern student, a graver error is dangerous. To count that witch-panic as something incident to human nature and common to all lands and times is to repudiate history altogether. Whatever in universal human experience anthropology or folklore may find akin to it, the witchcraft our fathers feared and fought was never universal, in place or time. It belonged alone to Christian thought and modern centuries; clear as day to the historian of ideas is its rise, progress, and decline.

In the later thirteenth century, theologians developed their theory of human relations with Satan. Only in the fourteenth did the Holy Inquisition draw witchcraft fully into its jurisdiction and, by confusing it with heresy, first make the witches a diabolic sect and give rise to the notion of the witch-sabbath. It was in the fifteenth that the theory and the procedure spread to the secular courts and that in these, as in the ecclesiastical, the torture began to prove an inexhaustible source of fresh accusations, fresh delusions. I


A rising tide of witchcraft hysteria overwhelmed the sober Puritan communities of 17th-century New England, culminating in the notorious Salem witch trials of 1692. Rooted in religious zealotry, political friction, and property disputes, the witch-hunts ranged beyond the gallows to ruin countless innocent lives. Voices from both sides of the controversy can be heard within this compilation of revealing documents from one of America's darkest eras.

Assembled by a distinguished historian, this volume comprises 13 original narratives by judges, ministers, government officials, and others involved in the trials and persecution of the accused. Many firsthand reports from the men and women charged with sorcery appear here, along with accounts of the evidence against them, tests for witchcraft, trials, executions, and much more. Written by such famous figures as Increase and Cotton Mather (and featuring the first publication of the latter's "A Brand Pluck'd Out of the Burning"), the narratives include "Lithobolia, or the Stone-Throwing Devil," by Richard Chamberlain (1698); "Memorable Providences, Relating to Witchcrafts and Possessions," by Cotton Mather (1689); "A Brief and True Narrative of Witchcraft at Salem Village," by Deodat Lawson (1692); "A Modest Inquiry into the Nature of Witchcraft," by John Hale (1702); and more. A peerless source of firsthand information, this compilation offers a superb resource to anyone interested in the belief in witchcraft and its effect on colonial America.


"The infamous Salem witch trials began during the spring of 1692, after a group of young girls in Salem Village, Massachusetts, claimed to be possessed by the devil and accused several local women of witchcraft. As a wave of hysteria spread throughout colonial Massachusetts, a special court convened in Salem to hear the cases; the first convicted witch, Bridget Bishop, was hanged that June. Eighteen others followed Bishop to Salem's Gallows Hill, while some 150 more men, women, and children were accused over the next several months. By September 1692, the hysteria had begun to abate, and public opinion turned against the trials. Though the Massachusetts General Court later annulled guilty verdicts against accused witches and granted indemnities to their families, bitterness lingered in the community, and the painful legacy of the Salem witch trials would endure for centuries.

Origins of the Salem Witch Trials
Belief in the supernatural–and specifically in the devil's practice of giving certain humans (witches) the power to harm others in return for their loyalty–had emerged in Europe as early as the 14th century and was widespread in colonial New England. In addition, the harsh realities of life in the rural Puritan community of Salem Village (present-day Danvers, Massachusetts) at the time included the after-effects of a British war with France in the American colonies in 1689, a recent smallpox epidemic, fears of attacks from neighboring Native American tribes and a longstanding rivalry with the more affluent community of Salem Town (present-day Salem). Amid these simmering tensions, the Salem witch trials would be fueled by residents' suspicions of and resentment toward their neighbors, as well as their fear of outsiders.

Did you know? In an effort to explain by scientific means the strange afflictions suffered by those "bewitched" Salem residents in 1692, a study published in Science magazine in 1976 cited the fungus ergot (found in rye, wheat, and other cereals), which toxicologists say can cause symptoms such as delusions, vomiting, and muscle spasms.

In January 1692, 9-year-old Elizabeth (Betty) Parris and 11-year-old Abigail Williams (the daughter and niece of Samuel Parris, minister of Salem Village) began having fits, including violent contortions and uncontrollable outbursts of screaming. After a local doctor, William Griggs, diagnosed bewitchment, other young girls in the community began to exhibit similar symptoms, including Ann Putnam Jr., Mercy Lewis, Elizabeth Hubbard, Mary Walcott, and Mary Warren. In late February, arrest warrants were issued for the Parris' Caribbean, Tituba, along with two other women–the homeless beggar Sarah Good and the poor, elderly Sarah Osborn–whom the girls accused of bewitching them.

Salem Witch Trials: The Hysteria Spreads
The three accused witches were brought before the magistrates Jonathan Corwin and John Hathorne and questioned, even as their accusers appeared in the courtroom in a grand display of spasms, contortions, screaming, and writhing. Though Good and Osborn denied their guilt, Tituba confessed. Likely seeking to save herself from certain convictions by acting as an informer, she claimed other witches were working alongside her in service of the devil against the Puritans. As hysteria spread through the community and beyond into the rest of Massachusetts, several others were accused, including Martha Corey and Rebecca Nurse–both regarded as upstanding members of church and community–and the four-year-old daughter of Sarah Good.

Like Tituba, several accused "witches" confessed and named still others, and the trials soon began to overwhelm the local justice system. In May 1692, the newly appointed governor of Massachusetts, William Phips, ordered the establishment of a special Court of Oyer (to hear) and Terminer (to decide) on witchcraft cases for Suffolk, Essex, and Middlesex counties.

Presided over by judges including Hathorne, Samuel Sewall, and William Stoughton, the court handed down its first conviction against Bridget Bishop on June 2; she was hanged eight days later on what would become known as Gallows Hill in Salem Town. Five more people were killed that July, five in August, and eight more in September. In addition, seven other accused witches died in jail, while the elderly Giles Corey (Martha's husband) was pressed to death by stones after he refused to enter a plea at his arraignment.

Salem Witch Trials: Conclusion and Legacy
Though the respected minister Cotton Mather warned of the dubious value of spectral evidence (or testimony about dreams and visions), his concerns were largely unheeded during the Salem witch trials. Increase Mather, president of Harvard College. (and Cotton's father), later joined his son in urging that the standards of evidence for witchcraft must be equal to those for any other crime, concluding that "It would better that ten suspected witches may escape than one. innocent person be condemned." Amid waning public support for the trials, Governor Phips dissolved the Court of Oyer and Terminer in October and mandated that its successor disregard spectral evidence. Trials continued with dwindling intensity until early 1693, and by that May Phips had pardoned and released all those in prison on witchcraft charges.

In January 1697, the Massachusetts General Court declared a day of fasting for the tragedy of the Salem witch trials; the court later deemed the trials unlawful, and the leading justice Samuel Sewall publicly apologized for his role in the process. The damage to the community lingered, however, even after Massachusetts Colony passed legislation restoring the good names of the condemned and providing financial restitution to their heirs in 1711. Indeed, the vivid and painful legacy of the Salem witch trials endured well into the 20th century, when Arthur Miller dramatized the events of 1692 in his play "The Crucible" (1953), using them as an allegory for the anti-Communist "witch hunts" led by Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s. Author
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